All about John

'How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?' asks a character in JM Coetzee's new book Summertime. This unsparing, autobiographical novel continues the intimate conversation the Nobel laureate has been having with a series of alter-egos in his work. James Meek listens in

At some point during the past couple of years, an eminent South African writer now living in Australia wrote this dismissive appraisal of John Maxwell Coetzee's œuvre: "In general, I would say that his work lacks ambition. The control of the elements is too tight. Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing. Too cool, too neat, I would say. Too easy. Too lacking in passion."

Even when a writer has achieved international fame and won the biggest trophies - the Nobel and two Booker prizes, in Coetzee's case - a bad review can't be easy to stomach. Harder if it is not just your book that is criticised, but the premise on which you have built your life: namely, that you can, must and should write. Worse still, if the reviewer impugns your character along with your novels.

It sounds hurtful, and perhaps it is, although the novelist who wrote it was JM Coetzee. The bad meta-review of Coetzee comes out of the mouth of one of the characters in Coetzee's new book, Summertime, which is about Coetzee. Summertime is full of harsh reviews of Coetzee by Coetzee, of Coetzee the writer and Coetzee the man.

The critics are four women, all once loved by "John Coetzee", the Coetzee character, three of them loving him back, in different ways. Another says: "... to my mind, a talent for words is not enough if you want to be a great writer. You have also to be a great man. And he was not a great man. He was a little man, an unimportant little man ... How can you be a great writer if you are just an ordinary little man?"

Coetzee built his literary reputation on the eight novels he published between 1974 and 1999. None was less than unusually good, but three in particular have carried his work into the realm of lasting things. The first was Waiting for the Barbarians, a parable about the use of falsely imagined enemies for social control. Substitute "terrorists" for "barbarians" and you have a history of Britain and America since 2001. (Coetzee's book came out in 1980.)

Coetzee won the Booker with his fourth novel, Life and Times of Michael K, an eerily colour-blind account of its eponymous hero's odyssey from the city to the wilderness and back in a South Africa enduring an imaginary war. A third masterwork, Disgrace, won him the second Booker. Coetzee took off his skin to write the almost unbearably truthful story of a white lecturer who takes sexual advantage of a student, is disgraced and goes to his daughter in the country, where she is gang-raped. The fact that the rapists are black, and that the up-and-coming black farm worker who lives close to his daughter isn't cooperative in catching them, provoked anger in the upper echelons of South Africa's post-apartheid government. Coetzee emigrated to Australia in 2002, although it is not clear whether this was because of the new South African order.

Since Disgrace, the nature of Coetzee's project has changed. He has moved away from naturalistic, storytelling fiction towards other forms - essays, polemic and memoir, or a composite of all three in a fictional framework. It is ironic that a writer with an undeserved reputation for being a recluse (Coetzee doesn't like giving interviews) seems to be taking less interest in the storytelling keel of his books and is inviting us instead to listen in to an intimate conversation he is having with himself, in the form of multiple alter egos.

One is a character type who crops up in Coetzee's novels, a type that has served western male writers of the last half century well, from Saul Bellow to Michel Houellebecq: the learned, sceptical man in middle years, unsure whether the lust for life and love that continues to course through him is a curse or a benison. The magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians and David Lurie in Disgrace are two such.

Another is Coetzee's female alter ego, Elizabeth Costello, an elderly, scholarly, world-weary novelist whose stern moral principles are provoked more by fear of death than by belief. ("She is by no means a comforting writer," Coetzee writes of her in his 2003 novel, Elizabeth Costello. "She is even cruel, in a way that women can be, but men seldom have the heart for.")

Coetzee's third literary alter ego is Coetzee himself. Summertime is the third of his fictionalised memoirs. Boyhood, published in 1997, tells of his rural childhood in the parched grandeur of the Karoo, in the west of South Africa, and Youth, which came out seven years ago, is an account of a hesitant coming of age into writership in Cape Town and London in the yet-to-swing 60s.

In the two earlier memoirs/novels, John, whose life closely follows what we know of the writer's actual biography, is portrayed in the third person as an obsessive self-questioner. He oscillates between contempt for himself and wild ambition. He is frantic for intimacy with others, but ambivalent about it when it comes - is it love? Power? Duty? Curiosity? These gem-like books - small, hard, glittering with piercing image and feeling - are narrated in the present tense, not the present tense of fake immediacy, but the present tense of recurring dreams.

In Summertime, Coetzee uses a more novelistic structure. He imagines that his doppelganger died just as he was about to write a sequel to Boyhood and Youth, covering his return to South Africa from the US in the 70s. He left notebooks - we are shown extracts - which suggest that, had he lived, this fictional Summertime would have been written in the same style as the earlier memoir-novels. Now an academic, Mr Vincent, who has never met John, is writing an account of that period of the writer's life, using the notebooks and interviews with five people who were close to him.

On the page, it is less complicated than it sounds. The interviews, which take place in 2007 and 2008, are the bulk of the book. The fifth interviewee, the only man, contributes little. The other four are Julia Frankl, a housewife who had an affair with John, and is now a psychotherapist in Canada; Margot Jonker, the Coetzee character's cousin and childhood sweetheart; Adriana Nascimento, a Brazilian dancer whom the Coetzee character fell for, but who rejected him; and Sophie Denoël, a French academic who had an affair with the Coetzee character while they were teaching at the University of Cape Town.

The intaglio Coetzee who emerges from the women's accounts is an unprepossessing figure, cold, awkward, remote, stubborn, foolish. He is scruffy and unattractive, physically, emotionally and intellectually. He is rude, bold when he should be discreet, withdrawn when he should be passionate. He has wispy hair, a scraggly beard and bad clothes. He is an unromantic loser, living with his old father in a rundown cottage, single, childless and poor. He's an ordinary failure, a bad lover.

"In his lovemaking, I now think there was an autistic quality. I offer this not as a criticism but as a diagnosis," Julia tells Mr Vincent. "Two inscrutable automata having inscrutable commerce with each other's bodies: that was how it felt to be in bed with John." She describes how John believed that Schubert had distilled sex into music, and obliged her to make love in time to a Schubert string quartet, saying that she would find out "what it felt like to make love in post-Bonaparte Austria". Adriana suggests the interviewer call his book about John "The Wooden Man".

Sophie, the last interviewee, is the most laconically damning: "He had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition," she tells Mr Vincent. Even cousin Margot, who has a sisterly affection for John and defends him from the suspicion of his other country relatives, calls him "an alleenloper, as some male animals are: a loner. Perhaps it is as well that he has not married."

The line is a reminder of how far Summertime is a fictive construct. Not only is the real Coetzee alive as I write, and I hope will long remain so; by the time the real Coetzee went back to South Africa in 1971, he was married with two children. His first wife, Philippa Jubber, died in 1991, long after they were divorced; his son Nicolas died in 1989. Of these stories, there are no traces in Summertime

Nonetheless, it would be fatuous to pretend that John is not in most ways the actual Coetzee's proxy. He shares the name, the fame, the book titles, the CV; John follows Coetzee like Wenceslas's page stepping into the king's footprints in the snow.

Why is Coetzee so hard on himself? Is it for comedy? He can make his Johns very funny, with their Don Quixote-like personal codes of conduct and their Woody Allenish neuroses about sex and status. The "Schubert as sublimated coitus" era is there to be laughed with, like the sequence in Boyhood where John pretends to be a Catholic at school and ends up being both subjected to antisemitism and accused of apostasy because he doesn't go to mass. "John Coetzee was actually quite funny. A figure of comedy," says Julia. But that doesn't explain the all-encompassing disdain of John that Coetzee puts into the mouths of his ex-loves.

Nor is Coetzee's portrait of the autist as a young man merely self-indulgent compliment-fishing, a rehearsal of a classic biographical device, the ugly duckling story. After all, the women of Summertime are not appraising John's thirtysomething self to contrast it respectfully with his present grandeur. They are talking now; they know his stature, the honours heaped upon him. Their words are as much obituary as biography, and the obituary is an unusually brutal one.

I don't believe Coetzee had a choice here. If he hadn't run the risk of seeming self-indulgent, he wouldn't have been able to capture an essential truth about "great men" - that the women who reject them in the early days are not necessarily blind to their potential. A woman who chooses not to sacrifice her life to the kind of selfish, cranky, vain, obsessive, unstable slobs who tend to become "great men" may be making a wise decision.

Books, like people, must be judged for what they are, not what they do, and Summertime is a sincere, unsparing attempt by a writer in his late 60s to imagine how a man like him would have appeared, in his early 30s, to women like the women he loved then; and how they might remember him now. The women's toughness towards their subject, their insistence that their reluctantly provided accounts of him are their own stories rather than Coetzee's, has the force of truth.

"I really was the main character. John really was a minor character," insists Julia. Her story is, to her, an account of her escape, at the age of 26, from erotic triteness, a dull marriage and the cynical mores of middle-class white Cape Town in the 70s, where husbands "wanted the wives of other men to succumb to their advances but they wanted their own wives to remain chaste - chaste and alluring". John may, she admits, have allowed her to glimpse "the possibility of growth without end in the realm of the erotic", but he is only a portal, and she walks through it. As lovers, they are truly together, body and soul, only once. "John was not my prince ... how very unlikely it was that he could have been a prince, a satisfactory prince, to any maiden on earth."

Adriana, the dancer, has a more visceral reaction to John's attempts to woo her and to his intellectual seduction of her daughter (he teaches her English at a local school). John's hopeless courtship includes an abortive barbecue - it rains - and efforts in Adriana's dance classes. She rejects the very language of his body. "He moved as though his body were a horse that he was riding, a horse that did not like its rider and was resisting."

Remembering the time of John - "a brief, one-sided infatuation that never grew into anything" - Adriana expresses loathing for his efforts to win her, and contempt that he gave up so easily. She is so vehement that the reader forgets the real Coetzee is in control of it all; piling on the invective against his alter ego until it seems, finally, that Adriana protests too much, and that the mooncalf did, after all, leave a faint mark on her heart.

Of John's women, the tenderest towards him is his cousin, Margot, who provokes a kind of tenderness in return that Julia, Adriana and Sophie did not see. But even Margot has to endure John quoting Waiting for Godot at her when she asks him to tell her a story; and even Margot "cannot imagine her cousin giving himself wholeheartedly to anyone".

The modern reader may admire John for his principles, for his insistence on doing "kaffir work" - manual labour such as laying concrete that white South Africans never do - and for his vegetarianism; but any lingering idea that John was a lifelong fighter for majority rule in South Africa gets short shrift from Sophie. "As long as liberation meant national liberation, the liberation of the black nation of South Africa, John had no interest in it," she says. "The liberation struggle was just, but the new South Africa toward which it strove was not utopian enough for him."

What, the interviewer asks, would have been utopian enough?

"The closing down of the mines. The ploughing under of the vineyards. The disbanding of the armed forces. The abolition of the automobile. Universal vegetarianism. Poetry in the streets. That sort of thing."

Coetzee has long been interested in the concept of the double. One of the requirements for a novelist is to be able to split his or her consciousness, to simultaneously be the fabricator of a character and that character's observer. It is a short step from there for the writer to see his own worldly persona, his striving, compromised social self, as a character distinct from the shy, confused, guilty recluse who takes up occupation in his head when he is alone.

Dostoyevsky's short novel The Double, where a clerk finds himself edged out of society by another man identical to him in every respect except that he is popular and clubbable, can be read as just such a text: the writer standing back and watching the grotesque spectacle of himself being successful in public, him and yet not him.

Dostoyevsky is a hero to Coetzee. When Coetzee was awarded his Nobel prize in 2003, instead of making a speech, he read out a short story, a strange, allusive tale called "He and His Man", ostensibly about Robinson Crusoe and Daniel Defoe, but really about doubles, about a character and his creator, a recluse and his busy, worldly reflection; how they were close, yet could never meet. The Nobel performance itself was a sort of doubling. "Here you see JM Coetzee, the silver-haired old fellow who joins you for dinner," it seemed to say. "Yet that isn't the Coetzee you are giving a prize to; you are giving a prize to Coetzee the writer, who perforce cannot be here. I shall read you some of his work."

Confession is another old preoccupation of Coetzee's, and through his double, John, the memoirs are replete with confessional moments. Two shameful childhood actions - pulling the leg off a locust and leaving his cousin to kill it, and secretly scratching his father's beloved recording of Italian opera with a razor - have haunted him ever since. Indeed, there is a sense in which Summertime, more than the two earlier memoirs, is part of a sequence of transgression, confession, penitence and absolution. That sequence comes up in an essay Coetzee wrote in 1985, "Confession and Double Thoughts". In it he is disappointed by the didactic moralism of the late Tolstoy; finds Rousseau's ur-autobiography, The Confessions, to be the work of a cynic who knew that the promotional value of exposing his petty sins outweighed the shame of revealing them; and points out that Dostoyevsky doesn't believe secular confession works. You can confess only to God.

"The end of confession," Coetzee concludes, "is to tell the truth to and for oneself." He doesn't offer a prescription for that. But his essay brings up the possibility that both an author and his character may not know the truth about themselves; which leads, in Coetzee's case, to the possibility of setting out to make fictions in the hope that, in the discourse between his unreliable self and the unreliable character he has created, he may perceive some truth.

"What is the one theme that keeps recurring from book to book?" Julia asks the interviewer in Summertime, referring to John Coetzee's work. "It is that the woman doesn't fall in love with the man." Certainly Coetzee's novels are about love between men and women, but so are most novels. The common thread that leaps out of Coetzee's work is not so much the gulf between men and women as the gulf between two incompatible life paths, the path of surrender and the path of appetites. Again and again, his books put these two ways of living in opposition: one character will be passionate, lusty, engaged, hungry, while the other will be austere, self-denying, detached, finding virtue in deserts and silence and small things. David Lurie and his daughter in Disgrace; Paul Rayment and Elizabeth Costello in Slow Man; the concentration camp doctor and Michael K in Life and Times of Michael K. Or, to use examples Coetzee has used, Byron and Jesus.

One way of reading Summertime is as a confession, an acknowledgement to women Coetzee has loved, of this double nature. The Byron in John pulls him towards women and engagement in worthy causes, the Jesus in him pulls him away. "His life project was to be gentle," says Julia of John; but goes on to say that this was why she couldn't stay with him.

In one of Summertime's most poignant (and, from Coetzee's point of view, self-accusatory) passages, Adriana, whose husband is dying after having his face smashed in with an axe while working as a security guard, asks why John could not have been a "facilitator" for her and her children, instead of a self-conscious Byron-Christ wannabe; instead of leaving her to cope with an alien bureaucracy alone:

"Sometimes, you know, I would be trudging the streets of that ugly, windy city from one government office to another and I would hear this little cry come from my throat, yi-yi-yi, so soft that no one around me could hear. I was in distress. I was like an animal calling out in distress."

It would be a cold reader who would falter here and ask who Adriana really is in Coetzee's post-modernist house of doubles: is she a real person? Is she made up? This is one of the moments in Coetzee's work where something stirs; where an expression succeeds which very rarely appears in English-language literature, and tends to sound off-key when it does - an expression of love which is not love for a person, but a tenderness, an empathy, with the very idea of life itself. How brave any creature is, just to live.

What was said

Life & Times of Michael K

September 1983: He is stronger than any hero, more subversive than any freedom fighter, simply by being the sort of creature he is. He is unassimilable; he has "passed through the bowels of the state undigested", which is the ultimate heresy of our time. It makes for a strong and memorable novel.

Disgrace

October 1999: Disgrace is an allegory. It is also, paradoxically, a novel of harsh, documentary realism ... It is a chilling read, taut as a drumskin. A far cry from the narrative exuberance of Salman Rushdie or Roddy Doyle, it raises the question of what the Booker is about.

Elizabeth Costello

August 2003: Perhaps Coetzee is now going to give up story-telling for ever, and write philosophical essays instead. Judging by this difficult and unforgiving book, that would be a diminishment. But he is impossible to predict.

Slow Man

September 2005: Coetzee's first novel since he won the Nobel prize begins with a bang and ends with a whimper ... There is something affecting about the writer who lets us watch him seeking to turn his fictions into flesh - and then lets us see why he fails. But the momentum of the book - always slow, like the man at its centre - is lost.

Diary of a Bad Year

September 2007: This isn't a book you'd press on someone new to this great writer. But it's much more than an exercise in letting off some steam inside a tricky fictional frame. Funnier than anything else he's written, if sometimes in a rather donnish way, it eventually becomes unexpectedly moving.

• Summertime is published by Harvill Secker (£17.99). To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p click here